Sets [KLD] Kaladesh Spoilers Thread

sigh

sigh

ahadabans said:
This is exactly the scenario I think where this card is appropriate. It's clearly a pretty big downgrade from Mulldrifter (evoke matters so much on that card), and tacking on 2 life at the cost of making it multi-colored is also a bad tradeoff. That said, if you want to tone down ETB value dudes this card is actually sort of sweet because it still does a lot of that while being harder to run and abuse. Instead of having a generic Ux value good stuff filler card (that goes in everything), you can make it a guild theme and tie it more narrowly to UW blink/skies or whatever. Neat.
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This is pretty much exactly what I think of this card! Right now I'm actually having a little bit of a dilemma deciding whether I should swap in this card over

Basically Enabler v. Payoff card. I think I'm still on Team Brago, but its a tough choice. This is a gorgeous design for shaping a deck that wants to maximize value on it. And its better in some other UW deck that isn't going to be able to capitalize on Brago (like hard control, for instance)

Lots of hard choices from this set for me so far. :)
 
GiftsForgiven

GiftsForgiven

sigh said:
This is pretty much exactly what I think of this card! Right now I'm actually having a little bit of a dilemma deciding whether I should swap in this card over

Basically Enabler v. Payoff card. I think I'm still on Team Brago, but its a tough choice. This is a gorgeous design for shaping a deck that wants to maximize value on it. And its better in some other UW deck that isn't going to be able to capitalize on Brago (like hard control, for instance)

Lots of hard choices from this set for me so far. :)
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I think there may be room for both, but their functions are so different that if you're happy with the mechanical composition of you cube, I wouldn't simply swap them.
 
japahn

japahn

This set has the best names ever.

  • Unlicensed Disintegration
  • Key to the City
  • Paradoxical Outcome
  • Morbid Curiosity
  • Live Fast + Die Young
  • Larger than Life
  • Welding Sparks
  • Kambal, Consul of Allocation
  • Panharmonicon

I just wish Demon of Dark Schemes was called Demon of Shady Schemes like it looked from the portuguese translation =( "Sombrio" means "dark", but stems from "sombra" = "shade".
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
yan said:
cloudblazer.jpg
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When I read this card I just groaned. Super lazy design. This is what a flying phyrexian rager would look like: just pure generic value, and not clever at all about how it goes about it.

Big yawns. I can't wait for the phyrexians to show up.
 
RavebornMuse

RavebornMuse

FlowerSunRain said:
If you have a 1/1 creature it does.

Vehicles are pretty cool, but they don't scale with the size of the "equipped" creature.
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I like Vehicles a lot because there's an upside to this lack of scaling - you aren't going to lose your low power utility creature in combat. Now Dragonmaster Outcast, Young Pyromancer, Blade Splicer, Joraga Treespeaker, and various other pals you want to keep on-board can help contribute to the beatdown more directly, without gambling away the utility creature to an ambitious block, combat trick, or attacker-eating removal spell. I'm thinking a lot of these will play way better than they read, especially in mid-power formats like many of ours where the focus tends to be on useful, utility-oriented bodies, rather than Savannah Lions and Hero of Bladehold.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist

RavebornMuse said:
I like Vehicles a lot because there's an upside to this lack of scaling - you aren't going to lose your low power utility creature in combat. Now Dragonmaster Outcast, Young Pyromancer, Blade Splicer, Joraga Treespeaker, and various other pals you want to keep on-board can help contribute to the beatdown more directly, without gambling away the utility creature to an ambitious block, combat trick, or attacker-eating removal spell. I'm thinking a lot of these will play way better than they read, especially in mid-power formats like many of ours where the focus tends to be on useful, utility-oriented bodies, rather than Savannah Lions and Hero of Bladehold.
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Or how about goblin welder for full on spice? :D

That point about vehicles benefiting from utility creatures actually puts forward a nice way to get a kinda new sort of deck style, right? That you'd have more utility creatures that you'd get away with usually, and then some vehicles to help with the red zone. That's a nice way to get value out of stuff like mana dorks too.

Onderzeeboot said:
What happened to #teamelegance? This is a clean and good card. Lightning Strike plays well, despite being a "lazy" design.
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It's also #teamETBdurdle
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Onderzeeboot said:
What happened to #teamelegance? This is a clean and good card. Lightning Strike plays well, despite being a "lazy" design.
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The existence of well designed elegant cards, doesn't preclude the existence of lazily designed but still elegant looking cards.

Not that I am even sure I would call this elegant. Its literally just a bunch of good stuff ETBs attached to a reasonable evasive body. Very thragtusky.
 
whydirt

whydirt

I think of elegance as solving a hard or complex problem with a simple solution. Cloudblazer is clean design, but it's not really what I'd call elegant. I also wouldn't call it any lazier than the white Nighthawk variant. Lots of players will get excited by this card just because it's a twist on Mulldrifter and that's fine - as always different cards are designed for different tastes.
 
RavebornMuse

RavebornMuse

Grillo_Parlante said:
The existence of well designed elegant cards, doesn't preclude the existence of lazily designed but still elegant looking cards.

Not that I am even sure I would call this elegant. Its literally just a bunch of good stuff ETBs attached to a reasonable evasive body. Very thragtusky.
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I thought the whole point of "elegance" was "straightforward and easy to understand without requiring a lot of mental gymnastics to maximize value from, simplifying draft tools and concepts to a more concise point to help novice drafters get through drafting, deckbuilding, and games without tanking for an extra hour a draft session trying to find out the most optimal way to play a card with a nonexistent or barely-relevant fringe case or usage"?

How is gain 2 life, draw 2 cards not elegant? Are you perhaps being a wee bit contrary? :p
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
RavebornMuse said:
I thought the whole point of "elegance" was "straightforward and easy to understand without requiring a lot of mental gymnastics to maximize value from, simplifying draft tools and concepts to a more concise point to help novice drafters get through drafting, deckbuilding, and games without tanking for an extra hour a draft session trying to find out the most optimal way to play a card with a nonexistent or barely-relevant fringe case or usage"?

How is gain 2 life, draw 2 cards not elegant? Are you perhaps being a wee bit contrary? :p
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I will not deny I am having some fun with the card, but it is also true I don't like it. It just was weird to me how suddenly the dispositive way to judge it was whether the card was elegant or not, which isn't really a factor I think any of us (except maybe sigh?) actually stress over any of the other myriad factors that go into analyzing a card for inclusion.

I don't understand why it, as is, needs this much upside. Drawing cards is usually accompanied by no additional spell effect, or a detriment (/see night's whisper), and here you get three spell effects.

The card would have made a lot more sense (and been more elegant to me, if we're going there) as a UB creature, with a night's whisper effect attached.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I think the card is fairly costed. Yes, Mulldrifter is generic good stuff, but I don't think there is a single cube out here where it would be too powerful. Boring? Maybe. I think we can agree that Mulldrifter is miles better than this card, and monocolored! Honestly, exchanging evoke for an additional color and gaining 2 life is not an upgrade. And in my book that's a good thing. I think it makes Cloudblazer more interesting than Mulldrifter.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Grillo_Parlante said:
I don't understand why it, as is, needs this much upside. Drawing cards is usually accompanied by no additional spell effect, or a detriment (/see night's whisper), and here you get three spell effects.
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Here's something to chew on....

So having watched a bunch of drafts by LSV from both the legacy and vintage cubes, he basically loves signets to the point where I think he might need therapy. Joking aside, I get why they are good since in any late game based deck it gets you there one turn faster and has synergy with certain powerful effects (wildfire and what not). And drafting my retro list, I am feeling a void with control strategies (I have mind stone... that's it). What exactly are these decks doing early and mid game if they aren't building a mana base? Well, they could be casting removal I guess (that's what they do in my midrange cube), but that is less powerful in a heavy spell list. Against storm, STPS is basically useless so I don't want to be jamming my deck lists with a thousand removal spells. Now, one thing old school control decks used to focus on is CA. Survive the early game and build up CA to win late game.

What does any of that have to do with the UW life drifter? Well, it sort of fits into that mold a little bit. As a control player, I think I'm pretty happy playing that T4/T5. It gains me a bit of life to ease whatever pressure I might be under. It draws me cards. And it might trade with something in combat (or at least provide a fog effect). In your midrange value decks, it's just something else to abuse with lark or whatever. I probably don't need to sell the card's value though, so I'm getting off topic a bit.

To answer your question... why does it have to be so much value? Because that is what 5 mana requires in today's game. In fact, this card might not do enough in higher powered cubes (mtgs has mostly written it off). That's the sad reality. But if you accept Magic for what it has evolved into, this card offers more than just boring value I think. Because it's more narrow, you can use it to limit the availability of these types of value effects. I actually think this card is really good in the context of offering interesting design options. And it gets points for being a simple design. Honestly, I haven't cared for much spoiled so far, but this is a nice card.

Or maybe I just like mulldrifter so much it's clouding my judgement?
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
ahadabans said:
To answer your question... why does it have to be so much value? Because that is what 5 mana requires in today's game. In fact, this card might not do enough in higher powered cubes (mtgs has mostly written it off). That's the sad reality. But if you accept Magic for what it has evolved into, this card offers more than just boring value I think. Because it's more narrow, you can use it to limit the availability of these types of value effects. I actually think this card is really good in the context of offering interesting design options. And it gets points for being a simple design. Honestly, I haven't cared for much spoiled so far, but this is a nice card.

Or maybe I just like mulldrifter so much it's clouding my judgement?
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Honestly, I think the fact that this is even up on the docket as an interesting ETB creature is almost to the level of the canary in the coal mine: not quite there, mind, but it feels close.

You're never going to really play this thing for synergy, its just going to be played for pure value, and can never really do anything but that. Mulldrifter at least has some some interesting synergies.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Fair enough. But does every card have to be chock full of synergy? I'm running Supreme Verdict because it's a really great signal for the color pair. It's also boring as shit. The thing though is some (most?) of my players sort of prefer the boring stuff. There's a lot of risk involved with trying to build a crazy synergy based list with weaker cards. You are dependent on drafts going your way. You are dependent on making a lot of difficult in game decisions. You are more draw dependent as well. I enjoy this sort of thing personally, but a lot of people don't. My midrange list has gone a bit too far in this direction - where it has almost become some sort of guilty pleasure for me and me alone. It's in a bad place which is causing me to rethink my obsession with synergy choices a bit.

I'm probably not going to run Life Drifter. But it does give me pause because it's narrow value and that is something I feel could be designed around. IMO, the biggest problem with generic value is that it leads to 3+ color good stuff decks. But if your list had nothing but multi-colored value cards (or ones limited to specific color combinations), you'd have to commit to a color combination to build the good stuff themed deck. And that gives you a ton of control on how it would be used (abused) by players. That is sort of cool.
 
Boromir of Borg

Boromir of Borg

sigh said:
So, I have a big dilemma with this set. Energy.

It seems like a sweet mechanic in a vacuum, but it presents issues. Namely, it's another resource to be spent and kept track of, and it comes at a cost to simplicity and barrier to entry. We just had to deal with {c} and incorporating that into formats (maybe ripping it back out later). What are people's thoughts going into this set on Energy? Just throwing in cards regardless of the mechanics particulars because they are good in play? Not incorporating it at all? Trying out a couple cards to see how they feel?

I feel like there could be a significant opportunity cost to not trying Energy out, but at the same time, it's definitely a different direction for magic to go than it usually does. That is a significant cost to a format also, or it can be.

Just overthinking it and let people have fun with some pokemon cards as they stack up E counters?
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This set so far is exactly why I dedicate an entire card per pack to testing out new cards. Some sets if feels like I'm scraping the bottom. This time I can easily dedicate 12+ slots to energy to see if it's any good.
 
shamizy

shamizy

japahn said:
This set has the best names ever.

  • Unlicensed Disintegration
  • Key to the City
  • Paradoxical Outcome
  • Morbid Curiosity
  • Live Fast + Die Young
  • Larger than Life
  • Welding Sparks
  • Kambal, Consul of Allocation
  • Panharmonicon
I just wish Demon of Dark Schemes was called Demon of Shady Schemes like it looked from the portuguese translation =( "Sombrio" means "dark", but stems from "sombra" = "shade".
Click to expand...

They could have named the Angel "Mother of Invention" and made it legendary or something. That would have been awesome.
 
shamizy

shamizy

I like the new Life Drifter, but gold slots are difficult to free up if it isn't supplementing an existing theme or bringing something interesting to the table. I like that this card exists, but I don't see myself using it in my cube any time soon.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

As soon as I saw energy counters, I immediately thought of two mirrodin cards that I loved and thought it was the same mechanic, but sadly no. Maybe power conduit is good enough with a ton of counter support?

 
genericco

genericco

I had a similar first impression of Cloudblazer - it stood out as a good example of the kind of ETB package I'm trying to avoid in cube.

Honestly it reminds me of of the un-polished half-baked designs you sometimes get in new Commander cards. It's too on the nose; it lands too squarely in the blue-white slice of the color pie; it spreads value around too blindly.

It makes for perfect filler in the tepid win-by-card-advantage decks that I'm trying to shoo out the door, and is way out of line as a payoff for the ETB-trigger-for-value deck in those colors that I'm trying to police.

Compare the experience of jamming this guy in your deck to something like Sphinx's Revelation, a card that challenges drafters and offers a bigger payoff. Or compare it to the sweet play on Drownyard Explorers, where the body is more than a chump blocker and the ETB value is contingent and synergistic, not just something you jam into play at first opportunity.
 
FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
I like Cloudblazer. Its a nice cog that does something desirable and it doesn't have any real baggage. I could see not wanting the effect (I personally have no use for it), but its a very clean way to get that effect if you do want it.
 
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